Students love to write suspenseful stories, especially around Halloween. They can be a fun diversion in a secondary Language Arts classroom which can sometimes be dominated by essays. But if done properly, they can also teach students a great deal about how stories are constructed using suspense and imagery to
We all want students to know how to annotate and automatically do it when they are handed a piece of literature. The trouble is, for most students annotation is something they do for the teacher, and not for themselves. They don’t take any ownership of the process and don’t see
I have taught Romeo and Juliet so many times in my career that I don’t have to read it anymore to teach it (isn’t that a great place to be?) However, there’s always something new to discover in the play. For instance, I read recently that all the good stuff
There is a lot of information out there about what to do on the first day of school. But what should you do on the second day of school to get students engaged in the subject matter of English classes? In previous posts I did a post on using the
There are a lot of suggestions floating around out there about what to do on the first day of school. But what should you do on the second day in Language Arts? I already did a post on using a short story to establish how you approach the task of
There are a lot of posts out there on what to do on the first day of school: set expectations, go over the syllabus, do some icebreakers, go get textbooks, cry that your summer is officially over. But what do you do on the second day when it’s time to
I have never seen a girl wearing a hijab in any educational clip art. The results of a search for “Muslim children clip art” and “Muslim children reading” were entirely religious in nature. Since I have so many Muslim students, I felt like they needed to be represented doing regular
